Many computer users today receive information from a number of different sources, and utilize a number of different devices in order to access this information. For example, a user may receive e-mail and instant messages over a computer, pages over a pager, voice-mail over a phone, such as a cellular (“cell”) or landline phone, news information over the computer, etc. This makes it difficult for the user to receive all his or her different information, referred to also as alerts or notifications, wherever the user happens to be.
For example, a user may be away from his or her computer, but receive an important e-mail. The user may have access only to a cell phone or a pager, however. As another example, the user may be working on the computer, and have turned off the ringer and voice-mail indicator on the phone. When an important voice-mail is left, the user has no way of receiving this information on the computer.
Moreover, many of the alerts may not be important to the user—for example, e-mail from the user's manager or co-worker should receive higher priority than the latest sports scores. More generally, the value of the information contained in an alert should be balanced with the costs associated with the disruption of the user by an alert. Both the costs and value may be context sensitive. Beyond notifications about communications, users are alerted with increasing numbers of services, error messages, and computerized offers for assistance.
The prior art does not provide for alerts following the user, for the prioritization of the alerts, nor for considering the potentially context-sensitive value and costs associated with notifications. However, in the cofiled, copending and coassigned patent application Ser. No. 09/596,365 entitled “Notification Platform Architecture,” an architecture is described that can receive alerts from a number of different sources, called notification sources, and convey them to any of a number of different outputs, called notification sinks. In one embodiment, one of the notification sinks is a computer, such as a laptop or a desktop computer, such that the notifications are displayed in conjunction with a user interface associated with the computer.